Fine Art Awardees 2023: Gyanwant Yadav, Khandakar Ohida, Mohit Shelare, Rabiul Khan and Sheshadev Sagria
Gyanwant Yadav, Khandakar Ohida, Mohit Shelare, Rabiul Khan and Sheshadev Sagria are the 2023 Inlaks Fine Art Awardees. All five awardees bring unique perspectives through their practices. Gyanwant and Rabiul both look at the relationship people share with the lands they inhabit. Mohit, Ohida and Sheshadev explore the experiences of the marginalised.
Gyanwant Yadav
Born in Pratapgarh district, Uttar Pradesh, Gyanwant Yadav completed his Bachelor’s and Master’s in Visual Art from the Delhi College of Art, University of Delhi. He comes from a family of farmers and therefore the observations he makes of the relationships shared between the soil, the farmers, their tools, food and culture form the basis of his practice.
As an artist, his area of research includes the changing textures of the agricultural field, its environments and ecologies, and the eventual, inevitable effects of urbanism and urban landscapes on village life. Over the years, he has witnessed a lot of transformation in villages, whether that may be the alterations made to the agricultural field itself, the material conversions in built structures, and patterns of migration with people moving to cities despite poor environmental factors.
His mediums of choice include different varieties of natural dust, soil, ink, tissue paper, rice paper, banana paper, grass paper, charcoal and water color. His output is primarily mixed media on paper and on-site work through different perspective . The textural surface of village and public walls serve as inspiration for him. Through these, he explores elements of the agrarian landscape, its inhabitants and the residues they leave behind. His rootedness in the agrarian landscape and its expanse allows me perspectives that he wishes to develop further through his artistic practice.
Khandakar Ohida
Khandakar Ohida is a visual artist and filmmaker. She works between West Bengal and New Delhi. Her areas of interest lie in lens-based mediums, installation art, drawings, and paintings, whose source of influence includes conscious notions of different encountered thoughts from her vicinity like personal memory, marginalized voice, collective trauma, and also nonlinear stories interacting with various cultural layers of society. Her film, Dream your Museum, has been showcased as a part of the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Germany, 2022, 59th International Art Exhibition La,Biennale di Venezia (as part of the 4th module of the Ukraine pavilion public programme), Venice, 2022, Emami Art Experimental Film Festival, 2022, Kolkata, “And Serendipity Art Festival, Goa 2019.
She has also featured her works at The Festival of Video Art by Indian Contemporary Artists (VAICA) at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi, Goethe -Institute/ Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai and Museum of Goa 2019-2020, ‘Ahang’ a travel exhibition in Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi, 2019, Students Biennale (Part of Kochi Muziris Biennale) 2016, Kolkata International Performance Art Festival, 2016 and many more. She was also part of the Next Step Art Residency 2019, At 1Shantiroad, Bangalore, and the” Storyteller” course organized by the Foundation of Indian Contemporary Art and Serendipity Art Foundation, 2018 amongst others. She has completed her BFA from Govt. College of Art and Craft, Calcutta, 2016 and MFA from Faculty of Fine Arts, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, 2018.
Mohit Shelare
Mohit Shelare is an artist based primarily in Delhi. His practice is constructed around how body, waste, and resilience intertwine with each other in various sites, events, and conditions. He draws the body and site together and develops gestures such as breathing, drinking, walking, and talking into critical dialogue. The research he is developing through his practice inquiries larger questions such as what it means to be impure? Through performative analysis he focuses on the Dalit consciousness and their struggles with politics of ecology. His practice culminates into performances, objects, drawings, and text.
Mohit facilitates research and conducts modules in universities and institutions. Presently, he serves as visiting faculty at the National Institute of Design, Kurukshetra. His participation includes Regional Art Assembly, Australia, 2022 (online studio residency). Staging the contemporary: The next generation 2022 (symposium). Home Workspace Programme, Ashkal Alwan, Lebanon, 2019. Five Million Incidents, India, 2019. Kochi Student’s Biennale, India, 2016. Sifting Futur, Switzerland, 2015 (residency).
Rabiul Khan
Rabiul Khan is from Santiniketan, Birbhum, West Bengal. He has completed his BFA and MFA in Painting from Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati University. For the past few years he has been engaging with his locality. Through a multi-disciplinary approach, his practice he is exploring the diverse identities of his home and its surrounding geographies. His source of inspiration and research are the people, communities and the landscapes of Birbhum. His engagements, interactions, memories with the otherwise overlooked communities generate conversations that act as the dialogue of his practice.
Recently he worked with the Film Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting Govt. of India on two projects. He is a founding and active member of UTHON- a collective space to incorporate various disciplines based in Santiniketan, Birbhum. He is also developing a space in Santiniketan for research based art activities and community engagements.
Sheshadev Sagria
Sheshadev Sagria, is based in Odisha. He has a BFA in Printmaking from GCAC Khallikote, Odisha and MFA in printmaking from MS university Baroda. He was born and brought up in Jurabandh, a village located in the western part of Odisha.
His practice works towards understanding caste hierarchies from a health and medical perspective, as well as analysing why diseased, deformed and unhealthy bodies are looked down on as impure, lower caste and marginalized bodies. Caste politics and health politics, in India, are interconnected and share a similar history.
His recent works look at his village as a site and narrate alternative reality of marginalised body and their alienated condition in remote areas. The bodies of marginalised and lower caste people are always considered impure hence unhealthy, and diseased. Relegated to the margins, these bodies have not only been alienated from society but also strategically erased from our memories, literature, histories and archives. He is observing and documenting the mundane laborious work and the kinds of instruments and objects they associate to survive which he sees as an organ of the body and narrate an alternative world of such posthuman bodies.
His medium of choice is printmaking and exploring various possibilities through installations. In addition to printmaking he works with painting, video, sculpture, and photography. He have exhibited in number of group shows including EMBARK III an online show at Gallery Ark , Vododara, Gujrat (2020) ; PUSHING PRINT Curated by Dr Bess Frimodig at Art buzz studio, New Delhi(2019) ; MVA II (Graphics) final show, Vadodara(2020) and participated thrice in Kochi Muziris students Biennale (2018-2019), (2016-2017), (2014- 2015).
